Welcome back to the Y I'm Lauren Magarri, no big tech is
doing big prep as midterms approach, twitter has
introduced a set of guidelines that seeks to protec
civic conversation and Tiktok has banned political
advertising in addition to banning politicians from
using app tipping tools or having access to add
features. And hey, facebook also announced it's
disabling new political ads a week before midterms, but
will all of these safeguards be enough to keep
americans from being misinforme As we head to midterms
The FBI is keeping a close eye on election related
content on social platforms and other democratic
institutions as well. So joining the conversation now
is laura dem low section chief for the FBI's foreign
influence task force, Laura, thank you for being here
before the 2020 election. The FBI warned that foreign
actors and cybercriminals would potentially spread
disinformation regarding the 20 results. What is the
FBI doing to stay ahead of potential foreign actors in
the midterms Thanks so much for having me appreciate
the question for the FBI, what what combating foreig
influence and protecting our elections has meant has
been really persistently combating foreign malign
influence for us. That really means two things. What we
need in order to use our authorities to understand a
combat this kind of activity is first attribution to a
foreign government or actor or their proxy And second,
some indication that the activity itself is what we
call malign influence and the malign influence sort of
definition for us. The scope of that has been really
important. What we're looking for is undeclared or
covert or criminal activity. Again, that's being
conducted on behalf of or by a foreign government or
intelligence service. How has Russia evolved since 2020,
when it comes to its to its tactics that we saw play
out with that election. That's a great question. Um
well in 2016 we saw many people have paid attention
this for a long time, but we saw influence actors doi
pretty basic digital influence operations. They were
they were pretending to be people they weren't on the
Internet essentially. In 2018 we saw an evolution of
some of that methodology to um to sort of more savvy
use of using innocuous non political content to build
followers before transitioning to more explicitly
political content. In 2020 what we started to see was a
combination of those quote unquote traditional digit
influence operations to also looking to co opt
unwitting americans and foreigners um in combination
with those digital influence ops So in 2019, the
Internet research agency, the Ira, which is a Russian
influence organization. They se up an NGO, a non
governmental organization in Ghana and Nigeria called
eliminating barriers for the liberation of Africa. Um
that was looking they were looking to hide the hand of
the Russian government behind their efforts to
influence american politics tha year. So in 2020 US
social media companies and broadcast media were able to
expose that particular effort really before it got off
the ground. Another tool that we saw, another sort of
change that we saw in 2020. Another example was the I
setting up a website called peace Data that that
company hired hundreds of unwitting foreign and
american journalists to create content targeting
specific demographics here in the United States. The
writers were real but the editors that were producing
the content that we're editing the content. Those were
IRA employees who were looking who are operating under
fake personas as far as action, you know, what do they
need to look out for on social media to make sure and
discern, okay, this is mis or disinformation and this
is okay content for me to take in. It's a great
question and a really hard one are in from our
information ecosystem. The spac we operate in is
really complex. It's really diverse, but that also
means that it's really resilient. So look for multiple
authoritative sources on social media in print and
broadcast media. Looking for multiple sources across
platforms. Really helps to verify the authenticity and
accuracy of information that you're receiving. And of
course if you if you see threats of violence, threat
or disinformation about the time manner or place of
elections. So disinformation or inaccurate information
about how when or where you can vote. Um that's
something that you can either flag through some of the
social media platforms. They've got their own portals
to do so or of course contact local law enforc
laura down low with the FBI's foreign influence tas
force. We appreciate you joining us and sharing your
insight. Thank you. Thank you so much up next. Could